However, we are reminded of Mountainrunner’s admonition that private military companies play into US foreign policy overseas – and in particular, US public diplomacy – in a manner that few analysts or decision-makers take into account. Blackwater is among the most visibly associated with US engagements in the Long War – even though it plays a protective rather than offensive role. In the minds of many in the Gap, Blackwater is just another instrument of the United States itself….

It has long been a maxim that any political target can be taken by a sufficiently motivated suicidal attacker. While modern protective intelligence and operational TTPs have thankfully greatly reduced the margin of success for an attack, the PIRA’s warning to Lady Thatcher after the failed 1984 IED attack still haunts every practitioner: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”…

Let us be clear, though – such issues need not arise from any impropriety on the part of the private contractor capability, be they intelligence officers or PSD operators. This is an emergent property of the current political and media atmosphere that has not yet reconciled to the business of privatized intelligence or PMCs – largely because of the continued illusion that the state can (or should) somehow magically still provide the range of capabilities demanded in the Long War….

Strategic communications, public affairs, and public diplomacy professionals that will have to deal with the consequences of such an incident in the future had best start preparing contingency planning for this sort of political football. It is only a matter of time – and of adversary kinetic and IO action.

The political football is already out there. The clock is already ticking for the media and the enemy to capitalize on the vulnerability made by private security forces, a similar vulnerability that led to their marginalization almost two hundred years ago. Private resources can be effective extensions, as they were to some in the past, but as the passive additions and extensions of foreign policy as they are today, they will increasingly a liability, as they were to others in the past.

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2 Replies to “Kent’s Imperative: Of PSDs and future assassinations”

Exactly correct–PSDs are and will continued to be viewed as instruments of American state power. Which isn’t entirely incorrect, as I doubt Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and co would hire themselves out to a country or non-state force that acts to frustrate American objectives.BTW, the bit about French and the books is hilarious.